Tracking email campaigns for lead generation in Google Analytics

Email is a great tactic for qualified lead generation and for delivering traffic to your website because these visitors have already expressed interest in your offering. So, it is important to track emails to see which tactics within your emails are the most effective. The best way to track your email campaigns is to create tags within each email and use Google Analytics to provide measurable statistics. Tags are created by inserting additional traceable information into your email marketing campaign links. Using the Google Analytics URL Builder you can create these tags to track email campaign information.

The most important reason behind adding tags to your email is that you want to be able to track which source your users are coming from. For example, if your email links are not tagged, your visitors will come through as a Direct Visit as compared to being tracked as an Email Campaign Visit. Additionally, if your campaigns are not tagged, you will not be able to know which of your email campaigns triggered a visit. Was it the first or second email that went out? If it wasn’t tagged, you will never know. Also, another major consideration when tracking email campaigns is being able to compare email visitors data to other visitors’ data on your site.

This table from the Google Analytics Blog can be used as a quick reference when tagging email campaigns:

Name

Description

Examples

Campaign Name

Name of the email marketing campaign.

Email News,
Email Promo 14 April 2009,
Email Newsletter May 2009

Campaign Source

Use Campaign Source to identify who distributed your email newsletter.

If you are sending your own email campaign then use your own company name. If you advertise in other email newsletters then use the name of the particular company sending that newsletter.

Campaign Medium

Set Campaign Medium as ‘email’ for all your email marketing campaigns.

email

Campaign Content (optional)

If you have multiple calls to action within your email, use different Campaign Content tags to see which version drives more visitors.

20% Discount Offer,
New Product Information,
Support Services

Campaign Term (optional)

If you have different types of links (e.g. text, buttons, images, etc.) use a different Campaign Term for each type.

Product Image,
Read More Button,
Text Link

Also, if you don’t want to manually tag your campaigns there are some very useful email marketing tools that have the Google Analytics tagging features built in, including MailChimp and VerticalResponse.